Fractals!

by Chris Tchou

Here are a bunch of shots of an IFS fractal program I made the other day.
The pictures below are attractors of IFS systems, using 3 transformations.
Each picture is composed of about 16000 dots, found using the 'Random Iteration' algorithm.
The hue of each dot is dependent on it's history. Each transformation not only
moves the dot, but changes it's color to have more red, green or blue. Thus, dots
which have the same recent history of transformations have nearly the same color.
Each dot adds a little color to the pixel it is on; thus regions with brighter colors
have more dots layered on top of one another. Some screenshots are below. The first
one shows you the three transformations used to make it.
These transformations smoothly animate
when the program is run, resulting in a smoothly changing fractal (on my Pentium II 450MHz
machine, I get 60 frames per second! :) These pictures don't really do justice to the moving
ones, but you can get an idea.

New!
Textured IFS fractals - this program computes the same fractals using
texture maps instead of points. It's much faster and smoother
looking, and lets you do some cool things.
The program requires DirectX 8.0 to run, and a video card that supports
render to texture (a GeForce2 or better, or a recent Radeon will work; make sure you
have the latest drivers).
Download it here: GlyphDX.scr(119k)

Illustration of the transformations: the red and green lines are the result of applying each
transformation to a vector pointing up (red) and to the right (green) from the origin. You
can see the portions of the fractal around these transformed vectors looks alot like the entire
fractal, only they are tinted red, green or blue.

Here's some more
pictures, without the
green and red lines:

And here's a few using solid colors:

If you want the program, here it is:
GLIFS.exe (40k).
Or get GLIFS.scr (164k) - the DirectX Screensaver
version. It doesn't look as good or go as fast as the Glide one,
but it runs under DirectX, and it is a fully fledged screensaver.

It requires Glide 3.0, so you will need a Voodoo card, or a
glide wrapper (if you can find one for Glide 3, let me know).
I'd recommend a Voodoo 2, and a nice PII processor. I have
no idea how well it runs on anything else.. :P